Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category

Right – so I took a 90ish day sabbatical from work. What the heck was that all about? I said I’d update you guys on that (and be coming back to work properly) in January, so here we are. This was a really tough video to make, but overall I’m doing well these days. There […]

It is with great pleasure that I formally announce this next game. Finally, Arcen is doing a true 4x! People have been suggesting that we do this for years, and I’ve wanted to, but I wasn’t really ready yet. Even so, bits and pieces of 4x infuse a lot of our games, particularly AI War […]

This week I went on the excellent Perceptive Podcast once again, which is always a pleasure. This time we discussed a variety of things: Open-ended development and how that differs from traditional linear game development. Why I think the new Curator system on Steam is the bee’s knees, and why I hope other stores do […]

Podcast #38 over at Space Game Junkie has a lot of great information in there about The Last Federation, our next title. There’s only so much information that I’ve said publicly about the game prior to this podcast, so if you’re following this game there’s a ton of good stuff in there for you. We […]

Valley 2 1.003 is out now, if you hadn’t heard. As we let the game breathe a bit, our focus shifts to Shattered Haven’s official launch later this month (March 18th, to be exact). Before that, however, we wanted to highlight all the coverage Valley 2 (and company) has seen in the past month — […]

Big things happening these days. A Valley Without Wind has seen several more additions and refinements over the past week as we approach the 1.1 (and first official) update for the game. We also have a pretty cool announcement we’ve been sitting on for a few days that hopefully we’ll be able to share before the weekend, […]

The past few days saw several new feature additions to A Valley Without Wind highlighted (at least I’d say) by the addition of the store in 1.009. Tom Chick talks to Chris for a good two and a half hours on Quarter To Three’s podcast, chatting on AVWW, Arcen, some preferred genres, and gaming in general. […]

PAX East coverage for A Valley Without Wind continues to roll in… Just Press Start’s Jeff Ortloff got the full tour of the Arcen Booth, posting audio interviews with both Chris and Pablo. Gameinpublic posted the first ten minutes of the indie game talk I took part in. This was day two (we did a […]

Volatar on the forums reminded me that I needed to do a post about how PAX went — so here I am! It’s been a whirlwind since getting back from PAX, and I still have an enormous backlog of emails that I’ve not yet had a chance to respond to. I’m getting to them — […]

We spent much of our time at PAX East chatting it up with press, filling interview appointments and having them take a quick tour of A Valley Without Wind. Here’s the coverage to come about from our trip to Boston thus far: John Polson interviews Chris in an excellent piece on IndieGames.com entitled Indie Devs Weigh in on […]

Chris and I had a solid chat last week with Eddie Milanes on the First Drop Show podcast. We cover a variety of topics regarding the design, development, and upcoming official release of A Valley Without Wind, including scrapped concepts, future possibilities for the game, why we try to only develop features in that we’d want to play, etc. If you’re looking […]

With A Valley Without Wind emerging out of over a month of heavy construction and significant changes, we’re entering a phase where the game is settling into a stable enough state for us to start chatting with the press about it once more. This week we’ve had a couple new interviews hit: Chris and I had an excellent […]

So much has happened since we launched public beta for A Valley Without Wind back in late September. In some respects it feels like it’s been out forever, when really we’ve just reached three weeks. It’s been fantastic to have anyone interested finally able to play the game. We’ve received both a wonderful response as well as […]

Chris Park and I sat down with Jenesee of The Grey Area Podcast for an in-depth chat on A Valley Without Wind, gaming in general, indie development, and of course all things Arcen Games as well. You should definitely set aside the 90 minutes for a listen; it was a wonderfully casual conversation with such […]

Arcen Games is pleased to show off several new additions, improvements, and changes for our upcoming survival action-adventure title A Valley Without Wind. We have a variety of items to update on this week, including interior generation, a reworking of the game’s story and setting, settlement changes, implementation of new features such as Explorer NPCs […]

Brutal Gamer’s Amy Nelson followed up her Tidalis review by interviewing us on all things Arcen and indie games. We discuss several topics including potential consoles/handheld devices we’ve considered for our games, as well as our selling points for A Valley Without Wind. Here’s one of the questions and responses from the piece: “AI War: […]

Chris sat down with Nick Puleo of Co-Optimus for a more in-depth look at the recently revealed multiplayer and co-op features for A Valley Without Wind. In it, they discuss MMORPG aspects, retention of the isolation theme, solutions on playing together with varying levels, avoiding the grind, the first season of LOST, and much more. […]

We have another sizable interview on A Valley Without Wind to pass along. Chris and I got together with James Murff of BigDownload to chat about Arcen and our upcoming game in detail. Topics touched upon include world-building, comparisons to other titles, pre-order plans and more. Also packed with the feature are some exclusive screens […]

Chris recently sat down with RPS’s Phill Cameron for a nice and extensive two-part interview on all things A Valley Without Wind. There are new details and a lot more in-depth explanation on the features we talked about in our recent announcement. The pieces contain a couple of new screenshots put together exclusively for the […]

“Chris Park is the wonderfully open and honest chap who heads up indie studio Arcen Games, he has been extremely open about the financial troubles the company has been going through recently, excellently detailed here on PC Gamer. I knew I had to talk to him about everything that was going on both financially and […]

The fact that Arcen is debt-free is an important point, and I wanted to make sure that didn’t get lost in the larger posts from the other days. Why is that so relevant? It means that, in the grand scheme, the company as an entity is in no danger of disappearing whatsoever. Even in this […]

MANY, many thanks here, everyone. A lot of great ideas came up through the forums discussion on this, as well as in the comments on my last post, as well as on Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s post about this, as well as elsewhere. Some great work has already been done getting the word out the press, […]

Most game companies probably wouldn’t share this stuff, and certainly not on their front page, but as our fans know we’re not like most game companies. So… To put it bluntly and briefly, at present we’re only bringing in about one half of the minimum money we need to survive as a company, and that’s […]

The Wargamer’s Chris Beck recently caught up with Arcen Games’ founder, Chris Park to chat about where the company came from and where it’s going. Topics discussed include: The history and design goals behind AI War. The motivation for and results from the ongoing updates to AI War. The Children of Neinzul micro expansion, and […]

Chris recently got interviewed by Jordan Rivas. Talks about Tidalis and the future of Arcen Games (secrets). It makes a good listen, so download it and slap it on the iPod, or click below on that page to stream it right now.

Chris Evans from The Reticule recently wrote a rather interesting article about how Mac (and Linux) gaming is on the rise lately. He interviewed Doug Lombardi from Valve, as well as a number of indie developers, including Chris Park from Arcen. Particularly interesting is the discrepancy in opinions between long-term Mac-only developers (who seemed rather […]

Over at Indie Game News, where Arcen’s Chris Park is a contributing writer, we’ve revealed a new screenshot of our upcoming puzzle game Tidalis, along with major news: Arcen is going cross-platform with a move to Unity 3D. It is not yet certain whether or not that will affect AI War down the road, but […]

HellBored recently conducted an interview with Chris Park about AI War, the reception of The Zenith Remnant, developing games as an individual versus as part of a team, and why developing capable RTS AI is such a challenge for the industry. Read The Interview

About Arcen (Ar-ken) Games

Originally known for our unusual and highly effective approach to RTS artificial intelligence in our debut title AI War: Fleet Command, we have since branched out into many other genres and styles of games.

As you can tell by browsing our catalog of titles, our interests are eclectic, and we have a particular affinity for blurring the lines between unlikely genres.